There are two topics I’m interested in right now. Here’s my first session idea: I’m compiling a corpus of both old and new media vernacular texts as part of a semantic/anthropological examination of American beliefs about health. (It’s called CADOH—Corpus of American Discourses on Health). I’ve been using the pilot stages of it to look at the distribution of terms such as fat, stress, cold, and oil. I’m envisioning its final form as a mix of vernacular discussions. While good corpora exist already for prose from contemporary magazine, newspaper, and fiction (e.g. COCA), I’m aiming to include more transient conversations about health, including blog posts and their comments, listervs, online forums and wikis, letters to the editor, and radio transcripts. So I’m proposing a helpathon in order to hear from others who have dealt with compiling current materials. The bootcamp sessions on the text encoding initiative, managing digital projects, and using regular expressions should all be helpful. But I’d also like to compare information on ways to gather, annotate, and share text samples. In using xml to annotate the metadata, what have others have found most useful– hand coding? Oxygen? Other resources? To make it useful for others, I’ll need to get copyright access for sharing. What ways to request copyrighted info have been helpful? (besides a big pot of money.) And, once the copyright issues are dealt with, what’s the best way to make the corpus accessible? Would this be a good Omeka project?
In Fall 2011, I will be teaching a graduate class on digital archives of medieval and early modern materials (description: www.utdallas.edu/ah/courses/standalone-course.php?id=3934). What I want to deal with in this class is not only the “traditional” research that can be conducted using the abundance of digital archives that are out there, but also the interpretive and theoretical moves that must be made on the development side before the archive even becomes available. I want to help my students think critically about how everything they encounter (printed books included) is mediated in some way. The conversation about how to talk to students about these issues of interpretation and theory in digitization work could be a very fruitful one. How does one explain TEI, for example, to someone who sees herself primarily as a reader of printed books? Or how does one get a student to ask questions about a “repository” he’s been using for years?
I would like to propose a session on how the U.S. government can help create programs that grow the digital humanities environment. Currently there are publicly funded organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), however the implementation of more organizations and programs that specifically focus on digital humanities could enable others to discover and learn about more about the field. Additionally this could lead to research and studies that enable us to find new innovative ways of using digital humanities within different industries.
Right now everyone is pretty much aware that there are many unresolved ongoing issues regarding the federal budget, however if we properly invest I believe that we will definitely receive a great return on investment. I also suppose that the bigger question is how to manage the programs to make sure that they are not only able sustain, but also effectively utilizing the taxpayers dollars.
I may not have all the answers to the questions I have proposed, but i do have a few suggestions to bring to the table. I believe that we all will have something to contribute if this session is implemented and I’m looking forward to meeting and discussing these issues with all of you.
Perhaps the best way to describe my session idea is to provide some detail information on my current project. This project is an article that concerns lucidity in communication and derives from my advanced composition class. It concerns the comparison of the internet as an iconic text with canonical (or iconic) literature from the twentieth century. The article focuses on using the internet along with literary material to teach composition and rhetoric, particularly to help college students identify how icons are formed in contemporary western culture and how that formation imbues objects with meaning. It begins with a discussion with students over iconography and ideas of physical space on the internet. For example, how one displays his or her facebook or myspace page identifies images or styles that can actually be numerated as icons. With myspace, one can enumerate what font (Helvetica, Times New Roman, etc…) is predominantly used and why. Also, with the rise of twitter, subject matter creates new communities of people communicating together. The internet basically establishes a democratization of icons at a certain level that previous media did not. Finally, the utilitarian aspect of the internet as a form of individual communication drives western iconography away from a postmodern concept of detachment, freeing the student of the disengagement demanded of icons of postmodernism. Keeping up with the technological advances in communication allows for a more cohesive community, especially when that community is marginalized. Therefore, I would like to have a discussion session concerning how icons and memes over the internet can not only strengthen marginalized communities, but also propel those communities into popular culture.
It is more or less clear the power that various social media platforms have for individual to individual interaction but how can a university or a department build a similar connection? The session I propose regards how different institutions – libraries, academics departments, universities – can use various social media platforms to engage their respective audiences.
With THATCamp Texas just three weeks away, we wanted to give you some updated information and make a couple of requests.
1) BootCamp registration is now open! We’ve got some terrific workshops on topics such as data visualization, building digital collections, creating GIS maps, and even crafting your own simple electronics project. Unfortunately, we can only accommodate 10-15 people in each workshop due to space restrictions and our desire to make the sessions as interactive as possible. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis, so please register ASAP. You can access the registration form and read descriptions of the workshops at texas2011.thatcamp.org/bootcamp/
2) The conversation has already begun on the THATCamp Texas blog at texas2011.thatcamp.org/, as THATCampers have posted and commented on some outstanding session ideas. If you haven’t done so already, please create your profile (using the login that you were sent last week) and submit a brief session proposal. So that we can group all of the proposals together, use the category “Session Ideas.” We encourage you to comment on posts by other participants, particularly those related to your own interests. The conversations on the THATCamp blog lay the foundation for a successful unconference by fostering the exchange of ideas and the building of relationships, so please participate!
If you’re unfamiliar with WordPress, no sweat—see codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts or get in touch with us with any questions. A quick overview: To post to the blog, login at texas2011.thatcamp.org/wp-admin/ You’ll reach a dashboard. Click ‘Add New Post’ to post your session idea. To change your THATCamp Texas profile, click ‘Edit my Profile’ under your user name on the upper left hand corner of the page.
3) Check out texas2011.thatcamp.org/logistics/ for information about hotel options close to Rice. Rates range from $79-$130 (hotels that are closer to Rice typically cost more.) You’ll likely be able to receive a discount if you ask for the “Rice rate.” Also, you’re welcome to post a roommate request to the THATCamp Texas blog; use the category “Roommates.”
4) Don’t forget to follow THATCamp Texas on Twitter at thatcamptexas. We’ll probably be releasing some information about THATCamp Texas on Twitter first.
Let us know if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing you in a few weeks!
Bringing DH to the LAM World
Mar 24
I would like to propose a session about how people are forging fruitful partnerships between DH (digital humanities) initiatives and the world of LAMs (libraries, archives, and museums).
In my own experiences in the LAM world, I have witnessed many opportunities for symbiotic partnerships between the two go unexplored. At museums in particular, many important cultural heritage collections remain hidden, due to lack of technological infrastructure, as well as fears about treading into new policy territory, exhausting resources, transgressing museum traditions, or ceding control of collections by making information available online.
Many museum collections are cultural heritage treasure troves and could become incredibly powerful scholarly resources if combined with DH tools and strategies like linked data and information visualization. Additionally, museum professionals have great expertise to offer in the way of understanding and serving users, as well as organizing and presenting visual information. There exists a growing contingent of technology-friendly professionals within the greater museum community, but many of them work for larger, more generously funded institutions like the Smithsonian, or they are working on finite, grant-funded projects. At museum conferences, too many of the conversations focus on “making the case” for broader technology implementation to policy-makers, as opposed to actually implementing powerful digital collections solutions.
If LAMs were more routinely and directly engaged with the DH community, and more dialogue focused on the goal of sharing resources and combining available and developing DH tools with long-standing LAM knowledge, expertise, and traditions, I sense that both communities of practice would be benefited.
I would love to hear about other people’s experiences working at the intersection of DH and LAM practices, and to gain new insights into how to bring the two closer together.
Looking forward to meeting you all!
I’ve got several session ideas rattling around my head. I doubt I could talk about any of them for more than 20 minutes, but if one of them fits well with another THATCamper’s interests, perhaps we can put a session together.
The last year or so has seen a lot of buzz about Citizen Scientists, Citizen Archivists, and many yet-unlabeled communities of people who volunteer their Serious Leisure time collaborating with institutions and each other to produce and enhance scholarship. Institutions are becoming interested in engaging that public via their own on-line presences and harnessing public enthusiasm to perform costly tasks, spread the word about the institution, and enhance their understanding of their own collections. Less well understood is the difficulty of finding those passionate volunteers and the nuances of keeping volunteers motivated.
I’ve been blogging about crowd-sourcing within my own niche (manuscript transcription) for a few years, and one of the subjects I’ve tracked is the varying assumptions about volunteer motivation built into different tools. Some applications (Digitalkoot) rely entirely on game-like features as incentives, while others (uScript, VeleHanden) enforce a rigid accounting scheme. There is a real trade-off between these extrinsic motivations and the intrinsic forces that keep volunteers participating in projects like Wikisource or Van Papier Naar Digitaal, and project managers run the risk of de-motivating their volunteers. Very few projects (OldWeather and USGS’s Bird Phenology Program among them) have balanced these well, but those have seen amazing results.
As a software developer my focus has been on the features of a web application, but finding volunteer communities to use the applications is equally important. I’ve got a few ideas about what makes a successful on-line volunteer project but I’d love to hear from people from different backgrounds who have more experience in both on-line and real-world outreach.
Engaging the public.
Mar 21
Recently I attended the OAH conference in Houston. One of the sessions, “Texas Textbook Controversy” (which I live-tweeted: twitter.com/#!/search/txtxtbk) continually returned to the topic of engaging the public in what historians do.
I’d like to propose a session on getting the most out of text-mining historical documents through visualizations. There has been a lot of attention recently lavished (rightfully, for the most part) on Google’s n-gram tool and the recent Science article. And text-mining has been gaining a lot of attention from humanists, particularly as easily adopted new tools and programs become available.
I’m working on two big projects that try to extract meaningful patterns from large collections (newspapers in one, transcribed manuscripts in another) and then make sense of those patterns through visualizations. Most of this happens in the form of mapping (geography and time being the two most common threads in these sources), but also in other forms of graphing and visualizations (word clouds, for instance).
A major challenge, it seems to me, is that there is not a widely understood common vocabulary for how to visualize large-scale language patterns. How, for example, do you visualize the most commonly used words in a particular historical newspaper as they spread out across both time and space simultaneously?
We’ve been experimenting with that in our projects, but I’d like to hash this issue out with folks working on similar (or not so similar!) problems.
